Defend Your Research: The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm

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The finding: People whose performance peaks in the morning are better positioned for career success, because they’re more proactive than people who are at their best in the evening.

The study: Biologist Christoph Randler surveyed 367 university students, asking what time of day they were most energetic and how willing and able they were to take action to change a situation to their advantage. A higher percentage of the morning people agreed with statements that indicate proactivity, such as “I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself” and “I feel in charge of making things happen.”

How to Tell If You’re a Morning Person

Morning people tend to wake at the same time every day, but there’s a significant gap between evening people’s weekday and weekend wake-up times. In Randler’s study of college students, that gap was about two hours, on average.

The challenge: Does physiology play a role in job performance? Can your biorhythms actually make or break your career? Professor Randler, defend your research.

Randler: Though evening people do have some advantages—other studies reveal they tend to be smarter and more creative than morning types, have a better sense of humor, and are more outgoing—they’re out of sync with the typical corporate schedule. When it comes to business success, morning people hold the important cards. My earlier research showed that they tend to get better grades in school, which get them into better colleges, which then lead to better job opportunities. Morning people also anticipate problems and try to minimize them, my survey showed. They’re proactive. A number of studies have linked this trait, proactivity, with better job performance, greater career success, and higher wages.

Differing Traits

Various studies have identified correlations between chronotype and certain personal characteristics. Here’s a sampling:

HBR: Are evening people all undisciplined free spirits? Don’t they sometimes take action to change their situations?

Yes, of course. And there are morning people who never do. The research shows correlations over a large sample, so it’s admittedly a simplification to say that morning people are proactive.

Is the tendency to perform best at a certain time of day immutable?

Much of morningness and eveningness is changeable. People can be trained to alter what we call their “chronotypes,” but only somewhat. In one study, about half of school pupils were able to shift their daily sleep-wake schedules by one hour. But significant change can be a challenge. About 50% of a person’s chronotype is due to genetics.

If I wanted to train myself to be a morning person, how would I do it?

The fascinating thing about our findings is that duration of sleep has nothing to do with the increased proactivity and morning alertness that we see among morning people. But while the number of hours of sleep doesn’t matter, the timing of sleep does. So you could try shifting your daily cycle by going to bed earlier. Another thing you could do is go outside into the daylight early in the morning. The daylight resets your circadian clock and helps shift you toward morningness. If you go outside only in the evening, you tend to shift toward eveningness.

If I taught myself to be a morning person, would I become more proactive?

I don’t know. One theory is that morning people are more proactive because getting up early gives them more time to prepare for the day. If that’s true, then increasing your morningness might improve your proactivity. But there’s evidence that something inherent may determine proactivity. Studies show that conscientiousness is also associated with morningness. Perhaps proactivity grows out of conscientiousness.

Lately I find that I get up earlier on weekends than I used to. Am I becoming a morning person?

The difference between workday and free-day wake-up times is definitely correlated with morningness and eveningness. Morning people tend to get up at about the same time on weekends as on weekdays, whereas evening people sleep in when they get a chance. But chronotype typically changes over the course of a person’s life. Children show a marked increase in eveningness from around age 13 to late adolescence, and, on balance, more people under 30 are evening types. From 30 to 50, the population is about evenly split, but after age 50, most people are morning types.

If a large proportion of people are evening types, why do most companies insist that everyone come to work early?

Positive attitudes toward morningness are deeply ingrained. In Germany, for example, Prussian and Calvinist beliefs about the value of rising early are still pervasive. Throughout the world, people who sleep late are too often assumed to be lazy. The result is that the vast majority of school and work schedules are tailored to morning types. Few people are even aware that morningness and eveningness have a powerful biological component.

Is eveningness the next diversity frontier, then? Will companies one day have to accommodate their night-owl employees?

First, more research is needed. There’s still a lot we don’t understand about people’s circadian cycles. But if current findings hold and eveningness is determined to be an inherent characteristic, I hope that organizations will look for ways to bring out the best from their night owls. Universities already offer a great deal of flexibility. I’m a morning person myself—I sometimes get up at 5 to work for a few hours before going to the office—but I have a colleague who comes to work at 11:30 every day and stays until 7 or 8 at night.

As long as morning people get the promotions and make the decisions, how likely is it that companies will accommodate night people?

Morning people are very capable of understanding the value of chronotype diversity. Remember, we’re conscientious. This understanding probably originated far back in history, when groups comprising morning people, evening people, and various chronotypes in between would have been better able to watch for danger at all hours. Evening types may no longer serve as our midnight lookouts, but their intelligence, creativity, humor, and extroversion are huge potential benefits to the organization.

Christoph Randler is a professor of biology at the University of Education in Heidelberg, Germany.

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